Underground
by rustedrainbows
Summary: A.C. 197: The ESUN celebrated the end of the Mariemaia Incident. Dekim was dead. The Gundams were destroyed. It is now A.C. 198, and the Preventers' biggest cover up is quickly unraveling.


At approximately 13:22, or 12:22pm for those bozo civilians who can't read military, Lieutenant Maxwell, head mechanics developer at the Preventers facility on colony X18997, was rudely awoken when the mattress he had been on suddenly reared its ugly head and dumped him on the floor. With his cheek stuck to the cold aluminum floor tiles and his body resembling a limp ragdoll, the lieutenant reluctantly cracked an eye open and blinked at the offending light that shined in it. A few moments of silence passed before he got up the motivation to roll over and figure out what had possessed his bed to turn wild and toss him.

He got halfway there and noticed a looming figure on the opposite side of his bed, which, by the way, seemed as perfectly normal and lifeless as ever. The back of his head hit the floor with a tiny little thump as his other eye opened. With a jaw-popping yawn he greeted the seething man who most likely had been the one to flip his bed, "G'mornin, Chang."

"It's not morning," the man snarled at him, his arms folded tightly over his chest as he glared at the lieutenant. "It's past noon, and you were supposed to be in the hangar twenty minutes ago."

Duo Maxwell blinked at his longtime friend. Had he forgotten to set his alarm clock? His head swiveled and his eyes searched for the clock that should have been perched on the table beside his bed. He found it on the floor, in more than one piece. He grimaced and sat up, fingers ruffling his bangs as he stretched. "Sorry, man, I-"

"Get dressed!" WuFei barked, flinging a pillow in Duo's face. Duo spluttered and grabbed the pillow, sticking his tongue out at his friend's retreating back as he stomped out of the barracks.

Duo sighed and climbed to his feet, tossing the pillow back onto his bed as he moved to find some clean clothes in his locker. It figured that it would be somebody angry like WuFei that would come and wake him up. Why couldn't it ever be somebody nice, like Sally? Duo frowned as he stripped and began pulling on a clean uniform. Yea, Sally would be a nice face to wake up to every morning, but she was always busy in the infirmary treating recruits that had gotten on WuFei's bad side. Duo snorted as he thought about it and laced up his boots. With that taken care of, he bit back another yawn as he grabbed his ID badge and made his way out of the barracks and toward the hangar.

----------------

Lieutenant Maxwell entered Hangar 7 with an empty stomach and two trainees trailing after him attempting to ask where Major Yuy was. Duo gave them little to no response because he'd done that once, and ended up with an earful about how he really should keep his big mouth shut if he wanted to have any friends, since if Yuy wasn't easy to find then he obviously didn't want to be found. Duo, however, had the suspicion that Heero would be lounging in the cockpit of the small cruiser waiting in Hangar 7 with WuFei.

Once he'd waved off the kiddies, Duo clambered onto the cruiser and punched the button to close the bay door. He fumbled his way to the cockpit and dropped into the copilot's seat. Luckily it happened to be vacant. When he managed to blink away the sleep in his eyes he looked over to see Lieutenant Colonel Chang leaning against the control panel with his arms folded, scowling deeply at him, and the Major, sitting in the pilot's seat and watching him with a neutral expression. Duo blinked at them, squirmed slightly in the oppressive silence, and then burst out with, "What?! I'm here now, aren't I?"

Chang snorted and glanced away. "Yes, you certainly are," he muttered. Heero gave WuFei one of those 'looks' that Duo had never quite understood and then sighed, shifting in the pilot's seat.

"Well," Heero announced, before a second tense silence could begin, "We need to launch or Une is going to throw a fit." The Chinese man leaning on the dash seemed to like that idea because he gave a slight nod- something like a whoop of joy in Duo's mind- and gave Duo a sideways glance.

Ah. That was his cue to vacate the co-pilot's seat. He sighed and waved a hand airily as he slid out of the chair. "Yea, yea," he said, "I'll be downstairs if you need anything." Downstairs meant in the tiny cargo hold at the back of the cruiser, where Duo had stowed the shit he'd been working on for the past two months.

As he strolled down the corridor he kept his left hand on the wall to keep his balance as the cruiser launched into open space. Sure, he was supposed to strap himself down like any other normal person, but he wasn't really a normal person, and he didn't really care much for safety regulations. The only thing he ever strapped himself to was his Gundam. He scowled momentarily. He didn't like thinking about Deathscythe. He liked to pretend that it had gotten blown up a year ago, after Dekim Barton had been shot and the world had returned to peace. But it hadn't. The gundams that had been destroyed had been fakes. To the world, the gundams were history. To Preventers, they were the trump card.

Duo stepped over the threshold and into the cargo hold, crouching and grabbing the tool box he'd set by the door the night before. Straightening up, he snaked his way through crates and found the small pile of gizmos that he'd been trying to get functioning. He set the toolbox down and sat next to the pile, picking up the one on top and scrutinizing it. The palm-sized, circular aluminum casing held a mock-up miniature field generator, a scale model of the planet defensors that had been used in the Mercurius and Vayeate suits that his mentors had built during the Eve Wars.

He ran his hand across the smooth casing, thinking at why he was doing this with his life now. He shouldn't be building stuff like this. Weapons and shields and soldiers, none of them should exist. But here they were, and here he was. Duo was now part of the Preventers, the only people in the ESUN who were supposed to have weapons now.

To prevent wars. That was his job now.

What was he doing though? He was battling terrorism. Dekin Barton hadn't died that day, 19 months and 27 days ago. He'd been shot in the chest and taken away in an ambulance. That ambulance had been found two days later in an abandoned alley ten blocks from the space port in Brussels, its driver dead from blunt trauma to the back of his head. The EMT had never been found, and neither had Dekim Barton. The general consensus was that the EMT had been a Mariemaia supporter, and a stupid one at that, since Dekim had been the one to shoot her. The guy had single handedly continued the war. Sort of. The Preventers were operating under the assumption that Dekim was still alive and very healthy, and was the cause of the major 'disturbances' that had been popping up all over the ESUN lately. There had been a suspicious shuttle crash at the J.A.P. area space port in Japan, and a bombing at a political rally in Colony D120 two weeks ago. Last Thursday a report came in that a shipment of supplies for the Preventers facility in California had been attacked. It had rolled into the base on fire. Preventers were scattered all over the ESUN dealing with random crises that didn't really seem random at all. Shuttles crashing, assassinations, and unexplainable explosions were just the half of it. People were in an uproar and Preventers wasn't sure what to tell them. Sometimes Duo wondered if this wasn't just some elaborate plot to get the Preventers shut down for incompetence.

Duo was preparing the base for an attack he was sure was coming any day now. He'd spent the last several months reworking old equipment from the wars into more useful stuff that the Preventers could use. That was his main job. His side job was training new recruits. His unofficial side job was piloting Deathscythe when it was needed. He seemed to be Une's jack-of-all trades at this point. Yuy and Chang had both ended up with more official-type jobs at Preventers, though they both trained recruits as well.

Dekim's disappearance had caused a lot of weird decisions among the pilots. Chang had immediately decided to accept Sally's offer as a Preventer. Heero had also decided that his skills were more useful in non-civilian work after two weeks of trying out school. Duo himself had been planning to go back to the scrap yard with Hilde, but Hilde had had other plans. She'd informed him the third week he'd been back that she was selling the yard, and had already applied and been hired on at the Preventers office in L4. She wanted to do something more useful with her life. After that, Heero had suggested he come work for Preventers as well, and Duo had agreed just because he didn't want to be lonely. Howard had rejected him point-blank.

He wasn't sure where Trowa was. He had vanished the day after Dekim was shot and hadn't been heard from since. Duo was pretty sure that he'd gone back to the circus life. The guy had a family after all. If Duo had a family he'd probably want to go back to them too. That's what Quatre had done anyway. At first he'd wanted to help with Preventers as well, but his sisters had managed to convince him that he would be able to do a lot more in a position within the Winner Corporation. That had ended up true in any case. He and Relena seemed pretty close nowadays. Quatre was always backing up her pitches whenever he saw them on the news.

Lieutenant Maxwell was hurled out of his thoughts and out of his seat when the cruiser lurched sideways. He landed on his back on the floor, blinking up at the ceiling in confusion. A few moments later he let out a yelp and sat up, grimacing from the electric shock that had just come up through the metal plating on the floor. He flung the mock-up out of his hands as a second, larger jolt went through him. It hit the wall and buzzed menacingly as it came to life, and then sparked a few times before falling to the floor with a clatter. Duo scowled and glanced at the remaining mock-ups. They were smoking.

"Goddammit!" he yelled as he shoved himself to his feet. Months of work had just gone up in smoke. They'd only been in space for a couple of hours, there was no reason for this kind of shitty piloting! He wobbled for a moment as he regained his balance, and then stomped his way out of the cargo hold toward the cockpit, determined to find out what the hell had just happened.


End file.
